Watching Melancholia made me feel really comfortable about my fixation on the end of days.

SPOILERS BELOW

Reading reviews, i feel like this film has been misunderstood by many critics. It’s not sci-fi, so it shouldn’t be analyzed as such. Melancholia starts off as a film about a woman (Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst) so crippled by anxiety and depression that she ruins her own wedding, but really it’s about a woman who knew the world was going to end so she saw no point in trying to adhere to the standards her family/society set on her. The second half examines her sister, a woman set in her ways and is always trying to make things right, as she tries to come to terms with the fact that earth is fucked, and there is no way to stop the impending doom. The only thing i found off putting was that Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) seemed to only listen to her husband about this planet, who wasn’t forthcoming with the fact that the planet could indeed collide with earth. In a house that big, she had to have had a computer with internet access, right? In the context of the film though, it works. 

Melancholia (the name of the Planet that collides with Earth) could just be a metaphor for depression, but i saw it as a metaphor for the lack of control we have in our lives. If the entire earth was destroyed, our entire existence would be rendered meaningless. It’s both bleak and beautiful.